This talk is about using synthetic monitoring to reduce MTTD&MTTR significantly and achieve high devops maturity. Daniel is a big believer in synthetic monitoring as a concept to build reliable production services. If engineers are supposed to run what they build, they need monitoring tools that work for them. He has built his own custom solutions in the past using Jenkins or GH Actions and later used SaaS tools for this. He would like to share his experience getting frontend engineers to build monitoring and get everyone on an engineering team to care about production system reliability. Daniel Paulus has taken a unique journey from military officer to tech leader, and he’s now the VP of Engineering at Checkly. Along the way, he’s worn many hats— from engineering lead to director —learning how to build strong teams and solve tough challenges. Outside of work, Daniel lives near Berlin with his family and four kids, while also finding time to maintain an open-source project. Whether it’s scaling teams or debugging code, he’s passionate about technology and enjoys sharing his knowledge with others.

In the world of observability, metrics and logs are the usual suspects for monitoring system health and diagnosing issues. But what happens when you don't know what to look for in advance? We tackle this challenge by incorporating business-critical events into our observability stack. Join me for this talk as I delve into how events can fill the gaps left by traditional metrics and logs. I'll share our journey in identifying which events are worth storing and how our technical setup evolved from periodic PostgreSQL pulls to real-time streaming with AWS Firehose. You'll see real-world examples through our Grafana dashboards and learn how this approach allows us to perform ad-hoc analyses spanning over two years without incurring huge costs.

I am a big believer in synthetic monitoring as a concept to build reliable production services. If engineers are supposed to run what they build, they need monitoring tools that work for them. I have built my own custom solutions in the past using Jenkins or GH Actions and later used SaaS tools for this. I want to share my experience how I got frontend engineers to build monitoring and get everyone on an engineering team to care about production system reliability. Daniel Paulus is an accomplished technology leader, presently leading as the VP of Engineering at Checkly, building synthetic monitoring with Playwright.